Harry Truman (50 page)

Far from welcoming his White House visit on March 13, 1948, my father was intensely angered by it. He resented the attempt to use the emotions of friendship to influence the policy of the United States as vehemently as he resented other people who attempted to influence him through his mother, his sister, or other members of the family. He was angry, and he made it very clear to Jacobson he knew he had not made the trip spontaneously - he had been persuaded by Zionists who were determined to put every conceivable pressure on the President.

At the same time, I want to make it clear that Eddie Jacobson was, first and foremost, a loyal American. He made it clear to Dad, as he wrote in a memoir of his meeting, which is on deposit in the Weizmann Archives in Rehovoth, Israel, that “I never wanted him to do anything for the oppressed Jewish people abroad if doing so would result in the slightest damage to the best interests of my country. On this subject, my friend and I could never have any disagreement.”

Eddie was soon reduced to asking my father if he would agree to see Chaim Weizmann. Again Dad refused. But when Eddie compared Dad’s hero worship of Andrew Jackson to his feelings for Weizmann, Dad agreed to see him, privately. He did so, the day following his dramatic message to Congress explicitly condemning Russian aggression, and the two men talked for three-quarters of an hour. Once more, Dr. Weizmann begged Dad to support the inclusion of the Negev in any Jewish state. My father assured him this idea had his full support. He also made it clear the United States still backed the idea of partition and wished to see it achieved as soon as possible. In fact, he told Dr. Weizmann that Warren Austin, the head of our UN delegation, would make an important statement to this effect the following day.

Warren Austin did make an important statement in the UN the following day. But it was not the statement Dad expected him to make, in support of partition. Instead, Ambassador Austin announced the United States was
abandoning
partition and now supported a UN trusteeship to replace the British mandate. Headlines and Zionists exploded across the country and the world. My father was called a traitor, a liar, and a lot of other unjustified names. Dr. Weizmann was one of the few Jewish spokesmen who remained silent. He knew Dad had been double-crossed.

Bitterly, on his calendar for March 19, 1948, Dad wrote:

The following day he wrote: “I spend the day trying to right what has happened. No luck . . .”

Lamely, my father tried to explain the trusteeship idea did not rule out American support of partition but merely postponed it. Mrs. Roosevelt tried to resign as a member of the American delegation and withdrew her letter only on Dad’s personal plea. It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career, and he could do nothing about it but suffer. To tell the truth about what had happened would have made him and the entire American government look ridiculous. Not even in his memoirs did he feel free to tell the whole story, although he hinted at it. Now I think it is time for it to be told. Perhaps the truth will give future Presidents the power to deal with such insubordination among the career officials in the government.

In a letter to his sister on March 21, 1948, Dad went even further, describing the really shocking arrogance of the State Department career men.

On May 14, Israel declared itself a state. Eleven minutes later, Charlie Ross issued a statement announcing a de facto recognition of Israel by the government of the United States. This was a decision made by Dad alone, in spite of the opposition of the State Department conspirators who for a time even had Secretary of State Marshall convinced recognition should be withheld.

As the
American Jewish Historical Quarterly
pointed out in a long review of Dad’s policy published in December 1968, this de facto recognition of Israel was not an act taken to gain Jewish votes. It was an action taken with the conviction that recognition was in America’s national interest. Moreover, de facto recognition was simply the recognition of a reality. It was a minimum step, which Dad absolutely refused to go beyond until after the 1948 elections were over. When it was clear Israel’s government was permanent, de
jure
recognition was extended on January 31, 1949. The United States was, in fact, the only country in the United Nations, other than South Africa, to withhold this de jure recognition of Israel so long. In spite of the large political advantages to be gained from taking the opposite course, Dad simply refused to do so because he did not think it was right.

In September 1948, when the United Nations released the report of Count Folke Bernadotte, the mediator who had been assassinated, General Marshall supported it in the United Nations Assembly, although it drastically reduced Israel’s size. Once more, Zionists screamed that America’s policy of “betrayal” was anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. Democratic National Chairman Howard McGrath pleaded desperately with Dad to issue a statement supporting Israel on Rosh Hashanah. It would, in the words of one adviser, make “rich material for the holiday sermons. Praise and thanksgiving would be echoed from every Jewish home and no Jewish leader could fail to sing the President’s praise.” My father turned him down. He was concerned about Israel’s treatment of their Arab citizens, and he felt that withholding this recognition was a way of guaranteeing their good behavior.

Late in October, a New York delegation called on Dad and warned him unless he offered Israel de jure recognition, raised the arms embargo, and supported the widest possible boundaries for Israel, he would inevitably lose New York State. Dad looked them in the eye and said: “You have come to me as a pressure group. If you believe for one second that I will bargain my convictions for the votes you imply would be mine, you are pathetically mistaken. Good morning.”

Other Zionists urged Eddie Jacobson to attempt another assault on my father. But Eddie, a wiser man by now, told them rather peremptorily that Chaim Weizmann and Dad remained close friends, and Dr. Weizmann had himself told Eddie there was “nothing to worry about concerning Israel.” Only after Thomas E. Dewey issued a strong, very biased statement accusing Dad of betraying United States pledges to Israel did Dad make a statement. In his Madison Square Garden speech of October 24, 1948, he simply reiterated his support for the Democratic platform plank which accepted the wider boundaries of the original partition resolution.

The
American Jewish Historical Quarterly,
at the end of its sixty-seven-page analysis of Dad’s policy toward Israel, concluded: “President Truman’s policy and action between May and November 1948, do not suggest a course based on political expediency. They reflect more, as had all of Truman’s decisions on this matter, the tremendous uncertainty and complexity of the Palestinian affair, and his belief that foreign policy was no place for political maneuvers.”

On the first anniversary of the passage of the United Nations Partition Resolution, Dad wrote to Chaim Weizmann, one of the few Jewish leaders who had never lost faith in him: “As I read your letter I was struck by the common experience you and I have recently shared. We have both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts to our supposedly forlorn lost causes. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right - and we were both proven to be right.”

In spite of the extremists who harassed him on all sides and the intransigence of his own State Department, my father achieved a compromise in Palestine that blended justice and realism. We managed to retain Britain’s friendship, and we did not lose our access to Arab oil or, during Dad’s administration, the friendship of most of the Arab states. To his deep regret, he was never able to persuade either side to agree to the internationalization of Jerusalem, which was a key point in his policy. Nor could he persuade the Arabs to join Israel in accepting U.S. aid for an ambitious program of development for the entire Middle East.

During the same harrowing early months of 1948, when he was trying to cope with both Palestine and Russia, Dad also prepared and submitted to Congress the most ambitious civil rights program ever proposed by an American President.

Based on the report of a committee of fifteen distinguished Americans whom Dad had appointed, it called on state, city, and the federal governments to make a united effort to close “a serious gap between our ideals and some of our practices.” It was a gap, Dad said, that “must be closed.” He called for establishing a commission on civil rights, a joint congressional committee on civil rights, and a civil rights division in the Department of Justice. He asked for a Fair Employment Practice Commission and stronger protections of the right to vote and a federal anti-lynch law. Dad knew the Southern wing of the Democratic Party would rise in fury against him, as they did, almost immediately. But he did not waver for a moment. One reason was the answer he gave to a reporter who asked him for a background comment on the message. He obviously was hoping to involve Dad in a complex ideological discussion. “The Constitution, containing the Bill of Rights, was the only document considered in the writing of that message,” Dad said.

An even deeper and more personal view of my father’s approach to civil rights is in a letter he wrote to his sister only a few weeks before his mother’s death: “I’ve got to make a speech to the Society for the Advancement of Colored People tomorrow and I wish I didn’t have to make it. Mrs. R. and Walter White, Wayne Morse, Senator from Oregon, & your brother are the speakers. . . . Mamma won’t like what I have to say because I wind up by quoting Old Abe. But I believe what I say and I am hopeful we may implement it.”

Some people thought my father could be persuaded to change his mind on civil rights. Shortly before the 1948 nominating convention, a group of compromisers, who shall be nameless here, practically pledged the support of the Dixiecrats if Dad would only “soften” his views on civil rights. Dad replied:

My father’s beliefs on civil rights were radical in the best sense of that word. They went to the root, the source. From the same profound understanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights came Abraham Lincoln’s vision of America, which Dad quoted to the NAACP in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial: “If it shall please the Divine Being who determines the destinies of nations, we shall remain a united people, and we will, humbly seeking the Divine guidance, make their prolonged national existence a source of new benefits to themselves and their successors, and to all classes and conditions of mankind.”

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1948, Dad wrote to his sister Mary from Key West, “I didn’t know I was so tired until I sat down.”

This was the only time, as far as I know, that he admitted how much effort he had put into the 1948 campaign.

November 11 was always a historic day for him. “I am on my way to the beach to take a swim,” he told Mary. “Just thirty years ago I was firing a final barrage at the Heinies at a little town called Hermaville northeast of Verdun. Some change of position I’d say.”

Although Dad strictly forbade us to gloat in public - “Now we’ve got ‘em licked let’s be generous and make ‘em like it,” he cautioned Mary - he could not restrain a few private expressions of delight over his victory.

“The White House sent me a big scrapbook of editorials from all the papers over the country - and my, how they’ve banqueted on crow.”

Winston Churchill, still out of office, underscored the importance of Dad’s reelection in his letter of congratulations:

Dad’s reply is also rather interesting:

Mother and I joined Dad in Key West for his vacation. We needed a rest almost as much as he did. Mother, in fact, had come down with a terrible cold and sore throat, and for two nights before we left the White House, Dad got up at ungodly hours like three in the morning to make sure she took her medicine.

The highlight of our stay in Key West, at least in my memory, was the impromptu victory parade staged by the White House reporters and aides. Everybody wore the wackiest costumes ever. Charlie Ross had on a pair of bathing trunks and an old-fashioned, Abraham Lincoln style stovepipe hat. The whole thing was a surprise, and someone snapped a picture of Mother and me laughing like a couple of lunatics. It
was
funny, and wholly in the spirit of that triumphant vacation.

It was on this visit, if my memory is functioning correctly, that the final installment in the saga of Dad’s unlosable eyeglasses was enacted. He was swimming, and I was sitting on the sea wall watching. The ocean was a little rough and waves were breaking on the wall. He swam over to urge me to join him. I declined, reminding him that the last time he had persuaded me to get wet, he told me the water was warm, and I came out feeling like a human icicle. Just then, a wave broke on the sea wall, and Dad went under. One of the Secret Service men standing nearby jumped in sunglasses and all. This was unnecessary heroics. Dad was perfectly all right. But the unexpected ducking had knocked off his glasses, and they vanished into the swirling depths. The loss was no special crisis. He had several reserve pairs of glasses in his quarters. But the Secret Service men thought they could find them, and several agents in bathing suits began to search the bottom. They had no luck. Later, Dad was sitting on the sea wall and happened to glance at the beach. He noticed something glinting in the sunlight on the shore. He pointed to it, and the astonished Secret Service men trotted around to examine it. There, believe it or not, were the glasses, washed up by the tide.

We flew back to Washington and Dad spent most of Thanksgiving Day signing thank you letters in response to the thousands of congratulations he had received: “At Key West I must have signed five thousand [he told his sister Mary], and since I came back here it has been terrific. . . . I went to the office at 9 o’clock and stayed until 2:00 p.m. and cleaned up a batch of so many I couldn’t count them - but I can sign from 500 to 1000 an hour.”

Two weeks later, Dad attended a kind of postscript to the campaign - the Gridiron Dinner. This traditional Washington shindig is run by the capital newsmen. It requires politicians of all stripes and types to laugh and be laughed at. Dad described the evening in rather pungent terms to his sister:

Although Dad wrote this letter on White House stationery, we were no longer living in the Great White Jail. Just in time, Dad discovered the White House was literally falling down. For more than a year, he had been prodding the Commission of Grounds and Buildings to take a good look at the place. He had begun to worry about it one night in 1947 at an official reception, when the guard of honor came in to take the colors away. As the husky young color bearers stamped across the floor in precise military unison, Dad looked up and saw the big chandelier above his head - and the heads of all his guests - swaying. A few weeks later, when the butler brought him breakfast in his study, he felt the whole floor sway as if it was floating in space. Several weeks after he reported these alarming observations to the commission, he learned his fears were well founded.

The time and place in which he learned it makes an almost incredible story. The news arrived in the middle of the last official reception of the 46-47 winter. Dad was listening to Eugene List, the young pianist he had discovered at Potsdam, play for “the customers,” as he called the guests in a letter to his mother: “I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment because Crim the usher and Jim Rowley came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching. Well, the survey had been made three or four weeks ago and it was a nice time to tell me. I let the show go on and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen, I’d been in a real fix. But it didn’t.”

Early in 1948, Dad told his sister what the engineers had finally concluded: “I’ve had the second floor where we live examined - and it is about to fall down! The engineer said that the ceiling in the state dining room only stayed up from force of habit! I’m having it shored up and hoping to have a concrete and steel floor put in before I leave here. The roof fell in on Coolidge and they put a concrete and steel third floor on to take its place and suggested that the second floor be done the same way. But Old Cal wouldn’t do it. He wanted it to fall like the roof did I guess.”

The shoring up was quite an operation. For months, we had to live with a forest of pipes running up through our private rooms. They were particularly thick in Dad’s study, my sitting room, and Mother’s bedroom. We had to walk around them to get out the doors. It was not what I called gracious living. Meanwhile, Dad appointed a committee of experts to examine the entire house from roof to foundations and tell him what needed to be done. Their report made hair-raising reading. The foundation was sinking into the swampy ground beneath it. There was no visible support for the ceiling in the Green Room but a few very rusty nails.

In the summer of 1948, the old house just started to fall apart. One of the two pianos in my sitting room - a spinet - broke through the floor one day. My sitting room, I should add, was just above the family dining room. Dad jotted on his diary-calendar: “How very lucky we are that the thing did not break when Margie and Annette Wright were playing two-piano duets.” A few days later he told his sister: “The White House is still about to fall in. Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath. I’m using Old Abe’s bed and it is very comfortable.”

On November 7, 1948, when we returned from Missouri, the White House engineer and architect refused to let us into the place. Dad told his sister he found the White House in one terrible shape. There are scaffolds in the East Room, props in the study, my bedroom, Bess’s sitting room and the Rose Room. . . . We’ve had to call off all functions and will move out as soon as I come back from Key West.

At that time, he thought it would “take at least ten months to tear the old second floor out and put it back.” By the time we came back from Key West, the experts had taken a harder look at the situation and decided there was nothing that could be saved but the outside walls. The entire house would have to be gutted and rebuilt.

This meant we had to move across the street to Blair House. There were no complaints on my part, except the usual moans during the packing and unpacking days. As I’ve explained earlier, I much preferred Blair House to the White House. But Blair House created serious entertainment problems for Dad and Mother. As he told his sister Mary, “It is a nice place but only half as large - so we have no place to put guests.” This applied not only to overnight guests but the standard official visitors at White House receptions. Instead of being able to entertain 1,200 or 1,500 at a single reception, everything had to be scaled down to half size, and this meant poor Mother was in perpetual motion as a hostess. But Mother “met the situation” Truman-Wallace style. There was, Dad pointed out in a letter he wrote toward the end of 1948, one consolation: “It’s a shame the old White House had to fall down. But it’s a godsend it didn’t when we had 1,500 people in it.”

Between moving out of the White House, getting settled in Blair House, and answering the tens of thousands of letters that poured in congratulating Dad on his victory, we found Inaugural Day on top of us before we realized it. Of course, numerous aides and a committee had been working to make the day a smash, even before the election. They had plenty of money to spend because the Republican Congress, expecting a Dewey victory, had abandoned its public parsimony and voted a whopping sum for the event.

The weather on January 20 was perfect, very cold, but with bright winter sunlight pouring down from a clear blue sky. Dad started the day at 7:00 a.m. by eating breakfast with ninety-eight members of Battery D and their wives. Mother and I came along and watched while he was presented with a gold-headed cane and a leather book in which each man had signed his name. Mother remarked that the cane would obviously last long enough for Dad to give it to his grandson. Dad promised to use it faithfully on his morning walks and then issued his marching orders for the parade. They were to be the guard of honor around his car on the ride from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House reviewing stand. He wanted them to maintain their old World War I cadence - 120 thirty-inch steps per minute. “I’m sure you can still do it for a mile and a quarter,” he told them.